Data Protection Information for Alumni and Supporters

Privacy Statement

The privacy and data security of our alumni, friends and supporters is important to us at UEA. Our community of supporters is a diverse, global group, which includes students, alumni, staff, institutional contacts, donors, mentors, event attendees, employers, policy-makers, supporters and advocates. We enable people to become informed and involved with the University through research, engagement, outreach and fundraising activities. This statement explains how UEA uses personal data for engagement, fundraising and alumni relations purposes.

Through our communications, events and activities we aim to build strong and meaningful lifelong relationships with our global community. We carry out research to better understand our alumni and supporters’ relationship with UEA and to help us identify your interests and potential for supporting the University.

In order to deliver these opportunities, services and products in a bespoke manner and to ensure each individual and group receives relevant information, UEA processes the personal data of our alumni, friends and supporters. This helps to ensure that you are getting the most relevant and interesting communications from the University for your interests and purposes. This also helps us, where appropriate, to ask for your support with the things we believe you care about the most.

If you have any questions about how we process your personal data or if you wish to opt-out of certain types of processing or communications, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email. The University web pages contain further information on data protection.

Privacy statement

What information do we hold about you?

Depending on your relationship with UEA, personal data held and processed by the University may include:

Biographical Information

  • Your name, gender, nationality and date of birth
  • Your education history including graduation dates and course information
  • Details about your family (for example your marital status or the name of your partner)
  • Your relationships with other UEA alumni, donors and friends
  • Your participation with student clubs and societies
  • Scholarships or awards you may have received
  • Honorary degree information

Interactions and Transactions with UEA

  • Your current and previous contact details
  • Communication preferences
  • Personal data provided by you for specific purposes (such as disability and dietary preferences for event management purposes)
  • Records of UEA events you register for and attend
  • Records of communications and interactions we’ve had with you
  • Records of financial transactions with UEA including event payments, donations and Gift Aid declarations
  • If you are a regular donor giving via Direct Debit, details of your Direct Debit instruction including your bank account details
  • Alumni or supporter memberships (such as donor Giving Circles or Alumni Benefit Card)

Your Interests and Activities 

  • If you volunteer your time to the University, your volunteer activities (for example if you volunteer in a mentoring scheme, careers help and event speaking)
  • Your responses to previous communications (such as event invitations, surveys and fundraising appeals)
  • Your career information including your employer and position
  • Selected media coverage which may relate to or include: press mentions, career highlights, life achievements and awards, interviews and profiles. We will only collect this information in instances where the media coverage is particularly significant (for example when someone is awarded a national honour or if someone has been interviewed by a newspaper) or if we believe that you could help the University meet its strategic goals

In instances where we believe that you could help the University meet its strategic goals through donations of time and/or money, we may also research and record the following information:

  • Your professional activities, employment, career highlights and other life achievements
  • Information about your interests
  • Philanthropic information relating to you and your family, including:
    • Your ability and willingness to make donations, including our assessment of your income and whether particular donations or funding appeals may be of interest to you (this is assessed through publically available information),
    • Your philanthropy and other giving, including donations to other organisations (which you may tell us about, or which we may learn of through the media) and other support that you provide to the University (such as mentoring, careers help and event speaking).

Where does our information come from?

The information we hold about you comes from a number of sources. If you are a student or studied at UEA, some of your personal data is transferred from your student record to the University’s alumni database when you graduate. A significant proportion of the information we hold is provided by you to us, for example you may give us information by filling in forms on the University’s website or by corresponding with us by telephone, email, face-to-face or otherwise. 

We occasionally augment the data we hold about you with information from publically available sources. Where relevant, we use targeted internet searches and may search the following websites (either directly or using search engines) in order to obtain and maintain the accuracy of data we hold. Examples of such publically available sources include:

  • Public sources for companies (in order to find information about the company and specific employees):
    • Companies House and other business related resources for UK companies (FAME for one example)
    • US Securities and Exchange Commission for US companies
    • Company websites
  • Public sources for charities (in order to find data of those charities’ employees, trustees, and to find information about donations and support):
    • Charity Commission and other internet sources for UK non-profits
    • Foundation Center for US non-profits
  • Public sources for individuals:
    • Sunday Times Rich List
    • Other rich list (Forbes Magazine’s international rich lists for example)
    • Property websites
    • The Queen’s Honours Lists
    • Data cleansing services (which may incorporate National Change of Address and BT Osis data)
    • LinkedIn, to check business details
    • Bloomberg profiles
  • Press sources (newspaper articles and databases) which may include media monitoring (such as Google alerts)

The information we get from other organisations may depend on your privacy settings or the responses you give to these websites. We recommend that you check these settings regularly. 

As part of standard fundraising practice, if you are preparing to donate a significant gift to UEA we will carry out due diligence research to ensure that donations are compatible with the University’s values and objectives and are consistent with its strategic goals.

How will we use information about you?

The data we collect is used by the University to support a full range of activities for our alumni, friends and supporters. We use data: to communicate with you, to fundraise and help the University meet its strategic goals, and for administrative purposes. The table below outlines where we gather the information necessary to carry out these activities and our legal basis for processing this information for these activities. Where we use legitimate interests to process information, we have carried out a balancing exercise which considers our need to process information against your privacy rights. To view this balancing exercise, please contact the University’s Data Protection Team by email.

1. To communicate with you

i. How we use your information

  • Informing you of other products, services or events related to UEA, such as alumni events, reunions or networks.
  • Updates on University news, for example via the alumni e-newsletter and occasional postal mailings, including, where relevant, communications from your former UEA school of study or faculty.
  • Information on fundraising campaigns, activities and appeals, including occasional general or tailored requests to consider giving financial support to the University, or to ask you to consider supporting the University by giving your time.
  • Sending you requests to meet with a member of UEA staff in order to reconnect with you and to explore ways in which you may wish to become more involved with the University.

ii. Where this information comes from

  • From you ( for example when you update your details on the UEA website)
  • Student Records
  • Publicly available information
  • Data cleansing services

iii. Our legal basis for processing this information

  • Legitimate interests to process your information and/or consent to contact you

2. To help the University meet its strategic goals, including fundraising

i. How we use your information

  • To conduct data analysis so that we can identify specific alumni and supporter characteristics in order to segment our database and target our activities and communications accordingly.
  • To group and label alumni and supporters based on their behaviour or characteristics to inform our strategic approach and measure the effectiveness of our approach such as engagement scores, calling groups or prospect labels.
  • Research using publically available sources to improve our understanding of our alumni, friends and supporters and to identify people who may have the means of supporting UEA at higher levels. This research informs our fundraising strategy and helps to target our communications more effectively.
  • To provide statistics to Schools and departments within the University on alumni destinations, employment statistics and geographical location which informs marketing information for student recruitment purposes and to inform service offering of careers support.

ii. Where this information comes from

  • From you (for example when you update your details on the UEA website or through actions you may take, such as attending an event)
  • Publicly available information

iii. Our legal basis for processing this information

  • Legitimate interests

3. For administrative and legal purposes

i. How we use your information

  • To conduct surveys for research, statutory, audit and industry benchmarking purposes.
  • Internal record keeping including the management of any feedback or complaints.
  • For general administrative purposes, for example: in order to process a donation you have made or to administer an event you have registered for or attended.
  • We may use your information to conduct data cleansing. We cleanse our data to ensure that we hold valid and accurate contact information for you.

ii. Where this information comes from

  • From you (for example your response to surveys)
  • Third-party services for data cleansing (such as the Royal Mail National Change of Address File, the Telephone Preference Service and deceased screening)

iii. Our legal basis for processing this information

  • Legal obligation in order to complete government mandated surveys and/or legitimate interests

Sharing and disclosing your personal information

Our data will be used primarily by the University’s Alumni, Events and Development Offices. Where appropriate and permitted, these offices may share data on a confidential basis with other UEA departments, including the Sainsbury Centre.

Sharing with External Parties
We do not sell your personal data to third parties or share it for any commercial purposes. We also will not permit third parties to sell on the data we have shared with them, under any circumstances. We will not usually share your information with external parties, except in the following circumstances:

  • When you have given us permission to do so
  • Where we are required to do so by law (for example, for former UEA students, where statutorily required, we will provide your contact details to government bodies, or an agency acting on behalf of such bodies, to conduct a survey of University graduates)
  • To hosts for specific events (such as brief biographies)
  • To third parties engaged by the University as approved data processors to provide alumni relations and fundraising related services, such as:
    • Mailing houses facilitating the delivery of large scale alumni relations or fundraising communications
    • Third party agencies who provide us with data about alumni and supporters (such as data cleansing and fundraising consultants)
    • Third party agencies providing software to deliver our alumni relations and development programmes
    • Consultants advising us on the delivery of our alumni relations and development programmes
    • Due diligence service providers

When transferring data to third-party processors, we make sure that data processing agreements are in place. If non-European Economic Area data processors are used, appropriate privacy safeguards are in place.

How long we keep your personal information

The University will retain your data indefinitely in support of your lifelong relationship with the University or until you request us to do otherwise. The data we retain indefinitely includes:

  • Biographical Information:
    • Your name, gender, nationality and date of birth
    • Your education history
    • Details about your family
    • Your relationships with other UEA alumni, donors and friends
    • Your participation with student clubs and societies
    • Scholarships you may have received
  • Interactions and Transactions with UEA:
    • Contact details
    • Communication preferences
    • Personal data provided by you for specific purposes (such as disability and dietary preferences for event management purposes)
    • Records of UEA events you are invited to, register for and attend
    • Records of communications and interactions
    • Records of financial transactions with UEA
    • If you are a regular donor giving via Direct Debit, details of your Direct Debit instruction including your bank account details
    • University memberships (such as donor Giving Circles)
  • Your Interests and Activities: 
    • Volunteer activities (such as mentoring, careers help and event speaking)
    • Your career information
    • Media mentions
    • Your philanthropic interests

We review the data held on our database to ensure that it is accurate and relevant to our aims (to communicate with you, to fundraise and help the University meet its strategic goals, and to carry out administrative tasks). Where we find information which is out of date, inaccurate or no longer relevant, we remove this data. 

Where you exercise your right to erasure, we will retain a core set of personal data ( such as name, education information, UEA ID number and date of birth) to ensure that we do not inadvertently contact you in the future and to maintain your academic record for archive purposes. We may also need to retain some financial records about you for statutory purposes (such as Gift Aid, anti-fraud and accounting matters).

For further detail about how we retain data, you can view the Development Office  and the Alumni Office data retention policies.

Exercising your rights

The privacy and data security of our alumni, friends and supporters is important to us at UEA. UK and EU data protection laws give you a range of rights in relation to your personal data for example: erasure, rectification and subject access. Information about your rights can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website. 

Where we use legitimate interests to process your data, we have carried out a balancing exercise which considers our need to process information against your privacy rights. To view this balancing exercise, opt-out of certain types of processing or communications, ask questions, or complain about how we process your personal data, please contact the University’s Data Protection Team by email.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Ensuring Your Information is Accurate

We continuously review records of alumni and supporters to ensure that your data is as accurate as possible. Alongside the research we proactively carry out, we may also consult alternative sources in order to undertake these checks, for example: Royal Mail address files, BT phone directories, reviewing job information that you have made publicly available via LinkedIn and other social media, newspaper articles, company websites and other publicly available sources.

Communication Preferences

Communications may be sent to you by post, telephone or electronic means (principally by email) depending on the contact details we hold and the preferences expressed by you about the types of communications you wish to receive. To let us know how you would prefer to keep in touch with UEA, to request no further communications from us, or if you have any questions about we process your personal data, please complete our Communications Preferences Form or email.

Corrections

If you wish to correct any information held by the University about you, please contact the Alumni Office. 

Making a Request for Personal Information

Alumni, friends and supporters may request a copy of the personal data held about them by UEA. If you wish to make such a request, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email.

Further information

The controller for your personal data is the University of East Anglia. 

We always handle your personal data securely and minimise its use and collection, and there is no overriding prejudice to you by using your personal information for these purposes. 

Our website

The UEA website privacy statement explains how data may be gathered about users of the University’s website. The University’s privacy notices do not cover the links within the UEA site which link to other websites. 

Other UEA Privacy Statements

  • The Sainsbury Centre
  • Careers Central (CCEN) (to be added soon)
  • Research and Innovation Services (RIN) (to be added soon)
  • Students
  • Staff

Changes to our Privacy Statement

We regularly review the University’s privacy statements. This privacy statement was last updated in January 2018. We will publish on our website any changes we make to this privacy statement and notify you by other communication channels where appropriate.